In Durham there’s a restaurant called The Cuban Revolution. I’ve never been there and have no intention of ever darkening its door. I shun it just as I would shun a restaurant called The Fourth Reich.

On its web site, the owners of The Cuban Revolution sugarcoat their cozying up to a mass murdering regime and ideology thusly:

Years ago, we were told that to be successful in the restaurant industry, we couldn’t mix politics with food. Well, so much for that advice.

We offer great food, decor, inspired artwork and music… specifically chosen to set the stage for a return to an era when challenging the norm was the norm. When JFK was a President… not an airport. When universities were hotbeds of political dissent. When the Rat Pack, Bardot and Marilyn were center stage and the promise of revolutionary Cuba filled the air.

We offer a spirited counter-culture environment reminiscent of a 1960s coffee house with the passion of a Latin beat… offering our own version of what we call Revolution Fusion Cuisine.

This is simply a Che Guevara t-shirt in gastronomic form, Che Chic gone gustatory. I’ve never understood the tendency for some (read that liberal) people living in a free society to romanticize mass murderers. But they have the right and the freedom to be totally misguided, something they couldn’t do in the romanticized Havana of their dreams.

But what do people who grew up in a society identical to that installed by Castro and Che romanticize? What do people who have seen tyranny first hand name their restaurants? Some entrepreneurs in Vyborg, Russia, a small town located not far from the Finnish border, didn’t think about naming their restaurant The Five-Year Plan or The Re-Education Camp. Seventy-five years living under the Soviet boot no doubt drilled out of them any romantic notions of a police state.

Instead, they named their discobar Svoboda (that means freedom in Russian), and used the Statue of Liberty as their logo. You can bet the mixture of food and politics at Svoboda is less apt to give you indigestion than what you’ll find at The Cuban Revolution.